Bramble Vine Comics

Here are some photos of the promotional material I created for the various comic book conventions I'll be attending to try and sell my books. The first convention will be the Small Press Expo (SPX) in Bethesda next month. I have everything ready at this point.

The paper flyers were pretty easy. I just got a couple of my single page comics, added a little blurb and my site's URL at the bottom and then printed them out on colored copy paper on my home printer. I used a paper cutter to cut them down to hand-out size.

The postcards came out very slick. They have a glossy coating on stiff card stock, just like any other postcard you may have seen. I had 100 printed up of each of the two designs you see in the photos and it was pretty cheap. I used iPrint.com for those.

The pins came out way better than I thought. These are glossy on the front and regular metal clip pins on the back. They look very professional and the place that printed them up, rockbuttons.com, did a fantastic job. I ordered a batch of 250 from them with the two images you see in the photos. I then went out to Hobby Lobby and picked up a bag of small zip-lock bags and stuffed in the pins. I then printed out several sheets of the label on regular red copy paper and stapled them onto the bags. I think the packaged presentation really adds a lot to the look of the pins as collectible items. These I'll sell for $0.50 each at the conventions.

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook

Here's another recent page out of my sketchbook. The Wushu Brothers are still popping up here and there. A Felix the Cat rip-off is here too. I like the idea of an all black character and I just wanted to see what it could be like.

There's also a weird looking fish kid ... thing.

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook

All my books arrived from the printer today. I took a few photos of the books and uploaded to them to share. I had these printed through Ka-Blam and I gotta say, they look fantastic. The print quality is right on the same level of anything I'd find on a shelf in the comic book shop. It's such an amazing feeling to see all my work put into a tangible product I can actually flip through.

I needed to get these books done and ready for the Small Press Expo next month and they came in plenty of time. I'll be selling these at SPX 07 and we'll see what happens. Hopefully people will like my work.

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook

Here are some more sketches where I'm working through my idea for the Kung Fu Brothers. Actually, after a quick Google search I see that there is already an organization that uses the name "Kung Fu Brothers", so I'm going to change the name to "The Wushu Brothers". According to Wikipedia "Wushu" and "Kung Fu" mean essentially the same thing. Plus, it sounds pretty cool, like the title of a kung fu movie, which is really the point anyway.

This past weekend there was another meeting with Jake and Lu, the editors of the Synesthetic Anthology book. They wanted to get together with everyone involved with the book so that they could go over how things went last week. Jake and Lu were showing the book around the Baltimore Comic Con. It sounds like people were universally impressed with the production quality. It really helps that the mock-up looks totally professional and isn't just some stapled together photocopy. Next steps will be getting more mock-ups printed and sent off to editors and publishers and keeping our fingers crossed.

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook

Here's my latest sketchbook page. I'm working through an idea for a new comic about these two brothers out of a bad kung fu movie hanging out in every day life. Spontaneous fights and proclamations of lost honor or some such things are sure to follow. Here are a few sketches along those lines. I haven't settled on the character designs yet, but I think there's an idea in here somewhere.

Labels: book, cartoon, cartoonist, comic, sketch, sketchbook